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Agricultural Productivity In Mercosur, Preeti Bharati

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis applies econometric methods to investigate reported decline in productivity in the countries of Mercosur in Latin America. While non-parametric methods in general claimed thus, more recent studies using parametric approach exhibited mixed results. We show that the results are contingent to the estimation method employed, the dataset used and the degree of diversity in socio-political and economic environment prevailing in the countries analysed. Our results indicate that the region is experiencing 2.24% productivity growth dominated by technical growth (1.97%) and marred by low efficiency (0.24%), the latter being explained primarily by the quality of human capital in agriculture, …